The Runes of the Earth: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - Book One by Stephen R. Donaldson Page B

to warn her. But she no longer trusted his absence to mean that anyone was safe.

    A lone in her bedroom, she asked herself for the first time whether she should flee.
    She could do that, in spite of her responsibilities. The necessary arrangements would require nothing more than a few phone calls. She could pack and drive away in an hour or two; take Jeremiah out of harm’s reach. In fact, she could make her calls when she had driven far enough to avoid any conceivable peril.
    Lord Foul was threatening her son.
    Roger Covenant had no idea that Jeremiah existed. Nevertheless it could not be an accident that Jeremiah had created images of Mount Thunder and Revelstone on the same day that Roger had demanded his mother’s release.
    And if Linden was wrong? If Roger proved to be as harmless as Barton Lytton claimed? Why, then she could simply bring Jeremiah home again, with no damage done.
    Aching to protect her son, she gave serious consideration to the possibilities of flight.
    But the prospect shamed her. And she had learned the necessity of courage from the most stringent teachers. Love and beauty could not be preserved by panic or flight.
    The ruin of Jeremiah’s hand was in some sense her fault; and she did not believe that she could bear to see him hurt again. But he was not the only one who had been maimed that night. And Thomas Covenant himself had died for the same reason: because she had failed to intervene. When she had seen what was happening, she had been appalled by horror, stunned motionless. In dread she had simply watched while Covenant had smiled for Joan; while men and women and children had sacrificed their hands to the Despiser’s malice; while the barriers between realities had been torn asunder by blood and pain.
    Now she knew that that night’s evil could have been prevented. When she had finally broken free of her dismay and charged forward, toward the bonfire, Lord Foul’s hold on his victims had been disrupted. If she had acted sooner, that whole night’s carnage might have been averted. Even the Land might have been spared—
    If she fled now, no one would remain to stand between the Despiser and more victims.
    She did not mean to be ruled by her fears again. Not ever. No matter how severely Roger Covenant provoked her.
    Here, however, she faced a conundrum which she did not know how to untangle. To flee for Jeremiah’s sake? Or to remain for her own, and for Joan’s, and for the Land’s? Trapped by indecision, she found herself sitting on her bed with her hands over her face and Thomas Covenant’s name on her lips, listening as if she were helpless for sounds of danger from downstairs.
    There were none. Occasionally the distant murmur of Sandy’s voice reached her. At intervals a car drove down the street. Erratic gusts of wind tugging past the eaves of the house suggested a storm brewing. She heard nothing to justify her gathering apprehension.
    Sighing, she told herself that in the morning she would make another attempt to enlist Lytton’s aid. Or perhaps Megan could sway him. For tonight she would watch over Jeremiah with all her vigilance, and let no harm near him.
    By now, he had probably finished with Mount Thunder and begun to separate the pieces of Revelstone. Nothing in his manner had suggested that Gravin Threndor and Lord’s Keep held any significance for him. As far as she could tell, his life remained exactly as it had always been, despite the Land’s strange intrusion into his lost mind.
    This was how he had spent his time for years: he put things together and took them apart. Indeed, he seemed incapable of any relationship except with physical objects which could be connected to each other. No human being impinged on his attention. He did not react to his name. If he was not involved in making one of his constructs, he simply knelt with his feet angled outward beneath him and rocked himself soothingly with his arms across